Джек Макдевитт - Cryptic - The Best Short Fiction of Jack McDevitt

He wore a dark business suit and a white carnation. I knew I should have kept going but something in his manner drew me back. “My name’s Plainfield,” he said. His eyes were dark and intense.

“I really don’t want to talk politics,” I said. “Or religion.”

“Of course not.” Despite the almost fearsome appearance, his voice was gentle.

“I apologize for the imposition, but I hoped I might persuade you not to cooperate with these people.” He said it as if he were talking about a disease.

“I don’t see,” I said, “why it’s your concern.”

“It’s everyone’s concern.” He glanced over my shoulder at the storm clouds that were rolling in from the west. Several people, acolytes, camp followers, whatever, were moving in and suddenly I was surrounded. “Imagine,” he said, “imagine what will happen to all of us when this process becomes generally available. And there’s only a trickle of babies coming into the world. When tired old men in ageless bodies have secured their positions. They will never step down. Not ever.” His audience were nodding their approval. “What kind of world do you think that will be?”

“I didn’t create the process,” I said.

“No. But you, and people like you, will guarantee its success. Unless you’re willing to sacrifice your personal ambitions for the common good, in which case you may help defeat it.” He smiled at me as if he could look directly into my soul. “But it’s probably already too late,” he said. “Sunrise got this out of the bottle when nobody was looking, and now we have to find a way to put it back in. Unless you help, unless you join with us, we’re not going to survive. People won’t survive.”

I tried to shake him off, to get away.

But he persisted. “They’re going to replace all the generations of the future with a single wave of genetically-altered creatures. Who, by any reasonable standard, won’t even be human. Is that what you support?”

“I don’t agree that that’s what’s happening.”

“Think about it. Sunrise, practiced on a wide scale, will guarantee that in a very short time, the human race will be dead in the water.”

“That’s absurd.”

“Is it?” A mixture of sadness and anger burned in his eyes. “Put it on a personal level, Mrs.—?”

“—Marshall.” I gave him my mother’s maiden name.

“Mrs. Marshall, do you like your boss?”

“I have to go.” I began pushing my way through. But the crowd moved with me.

“I hope so,” he said. “Because in the world you’re helping create, he’ll never retire. Not ever .”

I broke away finally and hurried toward Ohrbach Avenue, where I’d parked my car so the crazies wouldn’t trash it. I needed ten minutes to get there, and people followed me for a couple of blocks. But they’d disappeared by the time I got behind the wheel.

The talk shows seemed to have no other topic for the day. In fact, the Sunrise Project had been pretty much the sole subject of talk radio and TV since the press conference. Callers seemed unanimously opposed to the process. Most wanted it outlawed, and others thought it sounded suspiciously like something Hitler would dream up. Many wanted to know who would decide what constituted ‘enhancement.’ One said that any woman allowing Biolab to take her child should be horsewhipped. The talk show host allowed that he thought horsewhipping might be a trifle extreme.

No one, not a single individual during the fifteen minutes or so that I listened, thought that gene manipulation should be used to lengthen the lifespan or to enhance physical, psychological, or mental capabilities.

My intention had been to return to work after the interview—I’m a clothing designer for Stratton & Mulberry Associates—but the experience had been more upsetting than I’d expected. So I drove around for most of the rest of the afternoon, and afterward I could not have told you where I’d been.

Hal had tried to discourage me from going. It’s not really something we want to do , he’d said. It’ll be an emotional bath. Why put yourself through it?

But he was unsure too. I knew that. It was in fact a terrible thing to confront the kind of possibility that had suddenly and without warning opened in front of us.

I was waiting in the living room when he got home. Hal was an architect, just beginning to move up in the firm. He was in his late twenties, a model husband in many ways, and he knew as soon as he walked in the door what had happened. “You went over to that genetic place,” he said. It wasn’t a question.

I passed him a cup of coffee. “Yes.”

“How’d it go?”

I told him. I told him about a child who wouldn’t know what it would be to see his, or her, body decline. Whose horizons would be literally unlimited. Who, even though death would eventually come, would never know debilitation.

Hal was just over six feet. He had blue eyes and a good smile and an inability to hide his emotions that, as much as anything, had been what I loved about him. It also made him a poor poker player. Now he looked worried. “It’s hard to believe,” he said. “Do you think they can really do what they say they can?”

“Well, that’s one of the risks, isn’t it?” I’d read everything on enhancement technology that I could find. It had worked fine on monkeys and rabbits and rats. And the test children were doing fine.

“But nobody really knows that these kids won’t age, do they?”

“No. Not really, Hal. But if we wait until the evidence is in, we’re going to be a little long in the tooth to start a family.”

“I know.” He eased down onto the sofa and I could see he was troubled. “I’m sorry any of this technology has been developed. I wish they’d just left things alone.”

The government legislated against it for years, but interest groups had intervened, and I don’t suppose there was any way to keep it from happening. Maybe you could move it back and forth on the calendar a little, but that was probably all.

“We get to pick the personality, right?” he asked.

“Within limits, yes.”

“So we get a respectful happy kid who gives us no trouble?”

“Not too respectful. The booklets explain that they don’t want to take a chance on producing a race of people who’ll kowtow too much to authority. They feel a little rebellion’s a good thing. Especially in the kind of world that might emerge.”

“Great.” Hal grinned. “So that at least won’t change. And we can’t have any other kids.”

“Right.”

“And the child can’t have any at all. Ever.”

“Right.”

“I don’t like that part of it either.” Usually Hal was congenial, able to roll with whatever problems surfaced during the day without letting them work on him. But his face was drawn and pale, and muscles worked in the corners of his jaws. “We have to shelve all our plans. For somebody’s else’s pet ideas. How will we feel thirty years from now when we’ve had only the one kid and his hair starts receding? And he discovers he not only has developed allergies but he can’t have a family because that part of the procedure worked? You really want them to experiment with us ? With our future?”

No, I didn’t. Of course I didn’t. But we did not have the option of waiting several decades for the evidence.

“I think we ought to let it alone,” he said. “Let somebody else put their kids at risk.”

The subject devoured the evening.

We wondered how lonely life would be for an enhanced child. How would he be treated by other kids? Or by other adults, for that matter? How many others like him, or her, would there be? At first, certainly, too few. The bulk of the human race would probably be off-limits. (Unless he pretended to be normal, hid who he really was.) It was hard to see how such a person could form anything like a permanent relationship. Who’d want to live with somebody who was going to watch you age?